Room In The Middle
by Constant Babble
Summary: Angel didn't know the man standing in front of the anachronistic blue box, but he was pretty sure he wanted to punch that man in the face.


Room in the Middle

Angel smashed down a door, as he often did, and it made a loud, echoing crash throughout the dark stone church. He glanced around uncertainly for the monsters that Cordelia had insisted were wreaking havoc in the sanctuary at that moment. All Angel saw, though, were dozens of long, empty pews, ornate gold-plated icons flickering in the consecrated candlelight, several angel statues with their faces hidden behind stone hands, and a woman praying near the altar. Angel wondered briefly if he'd gotten the wrong Russian Orthodox church (could a place like Los Angeles have more than one Russian Orthodox church?), but then he heard the unmistakable sound of sobbing and sighed.

It was the correct church, alright.

Steeling himself, Angel entered the holy place that made his skin prickle like wool in summer. His footsteps echoed off the stone floor as he passed row upon row of elaborately-carved wooden benches, and Angel wondered if they made you walk the full length of the sanctuary to get to the altar on purpose. Like those who couldn't make it weren't worthy to reach it anyway.

The woman near the altar turned just as Angel passed one of the weeping statues and it occurred to him what an odd place it was to put a statue: right in the middle of the aisle.

"Are you alright?" Angel asked and then immediately kicked himself for the poor choice of words. The woman's hasty attempts to wipe the tears from her face could not hide her now-blotchy complexion.

"I mean, I know you're not alright, but…what?"

The woman's eyes had grown wide with horror, and it took Angel a second to realize that she was not staring at him, but at something just behind him. Angel turned and jumped.

The angel statue was directly behind him, just inches from his face. Angel backed away slowly. He could have sworn he'd passed that statue by several steps. The woman screamed and Angel whipped back around. Two of the other statues were definitely closer to them than they were before.

"What the—"

There was a cold, hard tap on Angel's shoulder, and he swiveled to block the attacker. But the only thing behind him was an empty field under a chilly starry sky. Angel squinted into the night; there was a faint light in the distance that might have been a campfire or a house.

"Okay…"

Angel took a deep breath, breathing in the smell of grass, oats, burning pine, and something he couldn't identify, like a mix between a greenhouse and ozone. A cough from behind him interpreted further contemplation of the odd smell, and Angel spun around with what he thought of as whip-sharp reflexes and _not_ a jolt of terror.

It was around that point when the world stopped even trying to make sense. A man wearing clothes that were distractingly similar to Angel's own-dark shirt, black pants, leather jacket-leaned casually against a large blue box with the words, "Police Public Call Box" glowing innocently at Angel.

The man raised an eyebrow that seemed to simultaneously ask, "Well? Impressed?" and, "Got a problem?"

Angel fought down the urge to punch him. "What did you do?" he demanded instead.

This only made the man smirk, which only made Angel want to punch him more.

"Me? I didn't do anything. You got stuck all by yourself. In fact, I'm doing you a favor."

"Really?" Angel said, skeptical. He considered taking a threatening step forward, but he was good at reading people, and the glowing sign above the man's head might as well have read, "Not Easily Intimidated." Not only that, but now that Angel was paying attention, his instincts were screaming at him. Something was wrong.

Well, aside from the obvious. He took another deep breath.

"Really," the man said, pushing away from the box and pulling a small, silver device out of his pocket. "You just took quite a trip," he said, pointing it at Angel and pressing a button that caused it to emit a brief high-pitched shriek. He glanced at it and inclined his head slightly at Angel like he was bowing to a small victory. "About 600 years and several thousand miles. Congratulations." He grinned. It was a brief smile; large and bright and more than a little insane.

He smelled a bit like gunpowder, and lacked nearly all of the typical undertones of Human. So something, probably whatever this man in front of him was, had displaced him 600 years. It was an amazing show of power and Angel probably only had to wait for the other shoe to drop.

"You aren't human," Angel growled. The sooner they stopped playing pretend the sooner he'd get to the bottom of this.

"Nope. Good job." He probably would have sounded more impressed with a child correctly spelling their own name. "I'm the Doctor."

"The Doctor," Angel repeated. It sounded like an immature attempt to make oneself sound more impressive. "Doctor who?"

That maniacal smile flashed across the Doctor's face again. He completely ignored the question. "And you can't really be saying 'not human' like it's an insult when you are..." he paused, looking Angel up and down with a sudden intense interest.

This time it was Angel who stood with his arms casually folded across his chest, waiting for the other man's response. At least, until he realized that he was essentially mimicking the Doctor's previous position, and quickly dropped his arms. He glared at the Doctor's coat, which really was terribly similar to his own.

If the Doctor noticed the glare, he didn't show it. Instead, he pointed the shrieking device at Angel again and took several steps forward, invading Angel's personal space and muttering with increasing speed and excitement.

"Dead. But without all of the post-mortem nastiness. Except for the obvious, of course. What's keeping you alive? No, here it is. Blood-borne parasite. It's completely taken over your nervous system." He caught Angel's brown eyes with his own icy blue ones, seeming to look through Angel instead of at him. "A near perfect symbiotic relationship. Except, I suppose, for the moral objections. You'd have to consume quite a bit of life force to keep time away like that wouldn't you?" He took a step back, but his stare lost none of its intensity.

That's when Angel punched him.

The Doctor slammed into the police box behind him and slid gracelessly to the ground. For the briefest of moments Angel was glad that, whatever this man was, he didn't seem to have any significant super strength. And then the Doctor kicked at Angel from his spot on the ground with enough force to knock him over.

Both men scrambled to their feet in the wet grass, Angel quickly twisting himself around and readying for a second attack, and the Doctor pulling out the device that he apparently used for everything and pointed it, not at Angel, but at the box.

Not willing to wait to find out what the Doctor planned to do, Angel lunged at him, only to smack into an invisible barrier two yards from the box and only inches from the Doctor's head. He pounded his fist against the barrier and blue sparks spiderwebbed away from the place of impact, fading away into the night again. Great. Angel was always on shaky ground when it came to magicians.

When he dropped his arms, the Doctor was standing just on the other side of the barrier looking disgustingly smug. "I assume the appropriate colloquialism would be, 'vampire,'" he finished, tucking his hands behind his back and leaning forward slightly.

Angel punched at the Doctor's nose and to his frustration the Doctor didn't even flinch as the webbed light case crawling shadows across his smug face. Angel growled and paced a few steps in each direction, mostly to hide the motion of shaking the pain out of his hand.

"Fine. So what do you want with me?"

The Doctor rocked up on his toes. "Nothing. Your arrival caused a temporal disturbance, but not the fun stepped-through-a-black-hole kind. No. You managed to cause major negative temporal backlash!" he said in a tone that suggested that Angel had won some sort of prize.

Angel shrugged his arms out and said in an annoyed tone, "Okay."

"So I came to poke about. You could have been anything. You could have been trying to go back within your own timeline. The only thing worse than accidental time travel is amateur time travel."

"And you're an expert?"

"Yes." There wasn't a hint of humility in the response.

"Can you get me back?"

"Easy. But why would I?" he stepped back to lean against the box again. "Like I said, I was doing you a favor."

"And you're not now."

"You punched me."

Angel had to admit he had a point. He also refused to regret the punch. Reaching a truce between his pride and his desire to return home, Angel shrugged.

The Doctor's mouth twitched into a smile. Not the maniacal grin he had been sporting before, but something smaller, shorter, and more genuine. "Right," he said. "Two things, then. First: how'd you get here?"

Angel considered for a moment before answering "I - something hit me."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

Angel tried again. "I was at a church. There was a woman who I was supposed to help, I think. I went in to talk to her and when I turned around the statues had moved."

"What kind of statues?"

Angel paused, going over the memory in his mind. "Angels. They all looked like angels."

The Doctor's expression brightened, like this detail explained everything. Angel was briefly reminded of Wesley when he finally put together the pieces of whatever mystery they were working on.

"Got nabbed by a Weeping Angel then? Makes sense. Probably hunting the girl, you got in the way, and they give you a nice little push. Can't eat any of the energy of course, since you haven't lost any potential; just a minor inconvenience really."

Angel snorted. He didn't think 600 years and several thousand miles was a minor inconvenience.

"But you can't just do that and not make a few waves. Especially with something like you. All of that potential to change the present? So! Negative temporal energy and here we are." The Doctor clapped his hands together. "Fantastic."

"Right." Angel said, feeling half as enthusiastic as he sounded. This was his go-to response when Wesley "explained" things at great length that Angel didn't understand.

If the Doctor noticed Angel's confusion, he didn't acknowledge it. Instead, he turned around, opened the door to the police box, and strode inside. A streak of greenish light escaped from the half-closed door, followed closely by an odd thrumming noise.

Angel was left blinking and marveling at just how quickly the night had taken a turn for the bizarre, even by his generous definition of the word.

Maybe he should just walk away and find his own solution to all of this. Even if he couldn't find a shortcut to his own future, it wasn't like he couldn't survive until he caught up with the correct time. The idea oozed through his brain like poisoned honey. If he could live for that long, he would eventually overlap his own time line; maybe even change it. He glanced over his shoulder towards the place where he had seen the firelight. It was gone now, but he was pretty sure about the direction.

His foot seemed to step away from the greenish glow coming from the box of its own accord. The second step was easier. He paused halfway through the third, his heel just resting on the grass. If he really was in the past, the possibilities were endless. He could stop himself from becoming a vampire, he could save so many lives. Another part of himself whispered that he could prevent the curse. His foot still hovered awkwardly just above the grass when the Doctor stuck his head out through the door. "Well?" he demanded.

Angel jammed his foot back down onto the ground so quickly it hurt. Already feeling like a disobedient child, Angel twisted back around and snapped, "Well what?"

"You just going to stand out there?" he shoved the door open a little wider.

"What about -?" Angel waved at the empty air where the ward had blocked him.

The Doctor looked at the empty space between them like Angel had gone insane. It was a look that Angel considered completely uncalled for. "The-" he said, doing a halfhearted pantomime of punching the wall.

This seemed to do it. The Doctor's eyes widened briefly in understanding before his expression slid back into one of impatience. "The shield? That only lasts 28 seconds." With a roll of his eyes he stepped back into the box. Angel stepped toward the door, thinking that the Doctor was going to need to put his ward back up again to prevent Angel from punching him again.

Angel caught a brief sight of what lay inside of the box: the large coral supports, the grating floor, and the round console with its glass center pistoning up and down in time with the thrumming noise.

And then he ran into the second barrier of the night.

At first he thought some sort of joke was being played on him, but he recognized this feeling. The push of this barrier was warm instead of electric, an almost gentle encouragement to stay away. Angel knew a threshold when he failed to cross one.

"So you live here," Angel said casually, leaning his weight between the frame of the door and the threshold.

The Doctor appeared from behind the console, flicking switches and pulling levers as he went. "What makes you think that?"

Angel waited for the Doctor to look up before shrugging against the threshold. "I'm good at guessing."

The Doctor's eyes lit up as he took in the impossible angle of the vampire's lean. He finished adjusting a knob on the console without looking at it and then bounded down to the doorway for a closer look. The shrieking silver gadget made another appearance.

"What is that?" Angel asked as the Doctor tilted his head in what looked like an attempt to see what Angel was leaning on.

"Sonic screwdriver," came the reply, punctuated with a little flick of the device. "I assume you need some sort of invitation?"

Angel knocked on the threshold, causing the warm push to become a burning shove and little ripples of light to spread out from the area of impact. The Doctor's eyes lit up again, his hand following the line of one of the light-ripples. "If you want to let me in. Did you steal that chair up there out of an old truck?"

Suddenly seeming to remember himself, the Doctor straightened. Schooling his expression into one of indifference, he folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the door frame, settling into the mirror position of Angel. "People are usually a bit more impressed."

Angel shrugged again. "I've been to the endless hallway under the post office."

"Which post office?"

"It's in Los Angeles. What's the second question?"

"Question?" The Doctor still seemed to be keeping half an eye on the place where Angel's shoulder hit the threshold.

"Before. You said two things; the first was how I got here. And the second was?"

The Doctor unhitched from the doorframe. "Come in," he said, watching Angel shift his balance to compensate for the absent invisible wall. He walked back towards the console calling over his shoulder, "What's your name?"

"Angel." He stepped into the room, grateful that the Doctor's back was turned because, endless hallway or not, it _was_ impressive.

"Just Angel?"

Angel grunted. He wasn't about to justify his lack of last name to a man who introduced himself as "The Doctor." Clanking his way up the ramp, Angel took in the jumble of buttons, levers, dials, keyboards, strings, pulleys, and what looked like half a clothes hanger that stuck out in total disarray. "So this is a machine."

"Sure looks like it, doesn't it? The correct term is TARDIS. She can take you anywhere, anywhen and -" he slapped Angel's hand away from where it was resting on the console, "the most basic and fundamental principles that it's built on would take you years to comprehend. So, try not to blow us up because you can't keep your hands to yourself. If you're having a really hard time of it try putting them in your pockets."

Both men glared at each other: the Doctor with his arms folded and Angel with his hands on his hips, and certainly not in his pockets. It lasted an embarrassingly long time.

Angel started to wonder if they were going to have to stand there all 600 years. He certainly wasn't going to be the first one to back down and something in the Doctor's eyes made him think that he, too, was far older than he looked. But the TARDIS gave a particularly loud thrum that drew the Doctor's attention away from Angel and back to flipping switches with a mumbled,

"If you get yourself sucked into the vortex and turned into a tiny baby with fangs, I'm not turning you back."

Deep down, Angel knew that the satisfaction he got from winning the staring contest was grossly out of proportion with the level of achievement it represented.

"Right!" the Doctor said, giving a whole panel a whack with a mallet. "Go shut the door and tell me when you're from."

"Don't you know? 600 years and a few thousand miles?" Maybe the Doctor had short term memory loss.

The Doctor brushed past him to close the door himself. "Sure, I could reverse engineer it, but footprints don't look like shoes, and ripples certainly don't look like rocks. It would be long and complicated and you wouldn't appreciate the results at all once I was done." Door secured, the Doctor bounded back past Angel.

Angel wondered if the Doctor were capable of traversing the ramp at a walk. "Oh. Los Angeles, July 2001." The Doctor smirked as Angel paused to think of what the date had been. "The eleventh. It was a Wednesday." The Doctor started spinning a wheel with his hand and Angel hastily added, "After dark."

"Didn't bring your sunscreen? Does the thing with the crosses work too?"

The floor rocked and the thrumming took on a deeper, more metallic pitch. Angel grabbed onto a handrail to keep his balance. "Sure."

"Really? Just crosses or symbols of faith? It would make sense. Everyone's allergic to something and faith's a pretty powerful form of energy." The Doctor leaned across the console to pull a lever with the tips of his reaching fingers. "I've been to a planet where everyone was allergic to shoes. Not just the object, but the idea. Can you believe that? Say 'shoe' and everyone within three meters sneezes." He grinned like this was the best joke he'd heard in years and leaned back on the console, apparently content with the current settings.

"Er," Angel said eloquently.

"Took me forever to figure that out, though. Thought I'd walked into a plague. It's amazing the problems that can be solved with paper airplanes."

The idea that he had never been good at small talk floated through Angel's mind, followed closely by a feeling of horror that what he had heard counted as small talk. Most of it was complete nonsense and he kept picking up phrases like "been to a planet" that he didn't really want to think about in detail. Demons were fine, dimensions without shrimp he could understand, but aliens just seemed like one impossibility too many.

He needed to drag the conversation back to something a bit less...alien. "Why'd you let me in?" Once he asked it, he realized how much it bothered him. Weird copycat alien magician or no, people just don't let vampires into their homes without a reason.

"Why not?"

The flippant answer grated on Angel. "I'm a vampire."

"And?"

"And vampires are evil." Angel waved his arms trying to get across the simple concept.

The Doctor looked unconvinced. "Are they?"

"Yes."

"All the time? Every single one?"

"Yes."

"Black hats and mustaches? You don't look like you have a mustache, but your current state could be hiding it."

Angel slammed his hand against one of the railing supports with a loud clang. "I mean it!"

"Oi! Don't hit my ship!"

Feeling slightly satisfied that at least the Doctor wasn't joking anymore, Angel rubbed his fist in his other hand. In spite of the Doctors protests, Angel doubted he could have damaged the ship. His hand hurt.

"You're not evil."

Angel looked up at the Doctor, who had turned around to adjust another lever. "How do you know that?"

The Doctor flipped a switch before looking back at Angel. "I've seen evil. You're not it. Hate so deep you could drown in it." Angel went still. The Doctor shrugged and continued, "You said you were trying to save a girl before you ended up back it that field - not typical evil behavior. And you hesitated. Evil doesn't hesitate."

"I have a soul." Angel said. It sounded like an excuse. "Most vampires...It's like that. Hate like you said. Hate and hunger and fear."

Their voices faded into the sound of the engines and the soft ratcheting noise of the Doctor's adjustments. Angel wondered if they might complete the rest of the journey in silence and then wondered how long it took to travel 600 years and several thousand miles.

"This soul. Where'd you get it?" The Doctor startled Angel out of his reverie.

"Gypsies. It's a curse."

"Doesn't sound like a curse."

"It feels like one."

Angel waited for the Doctor to ask, "Why?" People never seemed to understand why being "good" hurt every moment of every day.

"The hate doesn't go away does it?" The Doctor stuck his hands in his pockets. He looked like he was trying to pull himself deeper into the jacket.

Angel shook his head, too stunned to find another answer and unsure if there was one to be found.

Silence fell between them, this one quieter than the last. The engine noise had dropped back to a hum.

Those piercing blue eyes met Angel's. "Not being good isn't the same as being evil," the Doctor said quietly. "There's room for us in the middle. Come on." He nodded his head at the door and walked off down the ramp.

Angel took a deep breath and then followed the Doctor into Los Angeles.

"Hey, where's the church?"

"I just saved you for reliving a period of time where people used streets as sewers by piloting through the time vortex, safely moving you in both time and space, and you're complaining about the parking?" The Doctor waved in frustration at the cars driving past them.

Angel spun around looking for street signs that would help him figure out where he was and how long it would take to run to the church. "The woman's still in there. Those statues could get her too. I've got to stop them."

"You did a great job of it half an hour ago." The Doctor still looked slightly put out.

Angel paused. "Wait, could we just let them...do whatever it is they did to me and give her a ride back?"

The Doctor shook his head. "No. You were an anomaly. Most of the time you can't tell when someone's been taken. The Angels consume the energy that I'd need to track her."

Angel cursed silently. "Then how do I fight them?"

"You can't. They're quantum locked. If you look at them they turn to stone."

"Then I'll close my eyes. I've fought blind before."

"Annnnnd you get yourself slapped back in time again."

"There's got to be a way!" Angel yelled, drawing the attention of several passersby.

"Shove off!" the Doctor told a woman eyeing the two of them before turning back to Angel. "Listen, I've got a plan. It's just after sunset now, so I figure you've got time to get there. Take this," he pressed the sonic screwdriver into Angel's hand, "and press this button once they take your past self into the past. Not sooner, mind you, the last thing I want to do today is clean up a paradox."

"What's this do?" Angel asked, looking at the device. Although he had seen the Doctor use it several times, he wasn't totally sure it actually did anything.

"Nothing. Makes noise," the Doctor said. Angel sighed. "But the point is that I can listen for the frequency. As soon as the past you is gone, I'll throw open the TARDIS doors and turn her on full." the Doctor grinned like he was expecting Angel to burst into applause.

"And?"

The Doctor huffed again. "And these things live off of potential energy. Why go after some tiny human when they could have the whole universe?" He patted the box affectionately.

Angel nodded. "Won't that mean they'll come after you?"

"Yup! Sure will. I should be able to outrun them though." The Doctor scratched his ear. "They'll probably give up once they lose sight of me."

Angel was very good at spotting lies. "Doct-" he started, but the Doctor interrupted him.

"Come on then! You're all worried about saving this girl one minute and then you just stand there gaping the next. Just because I have a time machine doesn't mean we get do-overs." He gave Angel a gentle push on the shoulder.

Angel took a few steps backwards.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "I'll be fine," he insisted. It sounded like a lie, but a confident one.

Sometimes sacrifices were worth it. Angel knew that. He didn't know why this one was worth it to the Doctor, but didn't question it. There wasn't a lot of time. He jogged a few steps away and then turned to see the Doctor already halfway through the TARDIS door. "Thanks," he said. The Doctor gave him a curt nod. "And nice jacket."

With that he turned and ran in the direction of the church.

As plans went, Angel thought this one went off swimmingly. He beat himself to the church by fifteen minutes; enough time to marvel at how much the idea of beating himself anywhere made his head hurt and to find a spot near an open window where he would be able to listen to what was going on inside without bringing it to a screeching halt by actually watching it.

He only had to quietly listen to the woman cry for six minutes.

He listened to his past self walk down the aisle and ask the woman what was wrong. Not long after that the woman screamed and he heard his own voice exclaim, "What the-" before it was cut off in a whoosh of air.

He pressed the button. The screwdriver (he wondered if it actually worked on screws) shrieked. Angel spun around to look at the scene inside.

The woman stood alone and blinking inside the church. She slowly turned, taking in the whole room.

"They're gone," she whispered to herself. "They're gone. They're gone. Thank God, they're gone."

Angel smiled and stood. It was time to go home. While it couldn't have been more than a few hours since he had left the Hyperion, Angel found he wanted nothing more than to see his family.

He turned and nearly walked into a tall man in a brown coat.


End file.
